Sunday, May 27, 2012

Happy Memorial Day (But wouldn't it be great if we had fewer dead soldiers to remember?)

Here's a helpful chart showing total military expenditures on the left and military spending as a percentage of other nations' GDP on the right.

We're spending a lot of this money to keep the people on the right side of the chart, and ourselves, safe from some other people on the right side of the chart.

Since we don't have enough money to pay for all this, we're borrowing a lot of it from the people on the right side of the chart, some of whom we're trying to protect everyone else, and ourselves, from.

Otherwise, if we didn't borrow defense money from some of the bad guys on the right side of the chart, the bad guys on the right side of the chart would think we were weak.

1 comment:

The percentages of GDP are the relevant figures, not the nominal budgets.

It makes perfect sense that we spend about twice the GDP as many of those countries.

Just like gun massacres in gun free zones, with only a few exceptions, every major war followed periods of not "peace" but disarmament.

Weakness is the number one cause of war. You can rest assured that at least our military isn't used for internal security. It's remarkable that posse comitatus has remained stronger than crossing the Rubicon.